Avenged Sevenfold announces new drummer

Avenged Sevenfold has formally announced their new drummer, and he is Brooks Wackerman. This explains why Wackerman announced his departure from Bad Religion last week, a band he’d been with for more than a decade.

Frontman M. Shadows had this to say to Chris Jericho via the Talk Is Jericho podcast:

To be honest, Brooks’ name has always been in the mix. It was one of the names we were throwing around when Jimmy passed away in terms of who was going to step up for Nightmare. We felt Mike [Portnoy] was the right choice and we still feel that way. Mike just destroyed on the record. He was perfect. But at the time, our tour manager brought up Brooks’ name as well. But at the time he was also busy with Bad Religion and it was also … people were going to look at it differently because he was a punk drummer at this point.